Bismarck's childhood; the humiliations of Napoleon's victories,
the crowded, crowning victory of the Battle of the Nations…
Everybody in those days, wise or foolish, believed that the
division of the world under a multitude of governments was
inevitable, and that it was going on for thousands of years more.
It WAS inevitable until it was impossible. Any one who had denied
that inevitability publicly would have been counted-oh! a SILLY
fellow. Old Bismarck was only just a little-forcible, on the
lines of the accepted ideas. That is all. He thought that since
there had to be national governments he would make one that was
strong at home and invincible abroad. Because he had fed with a
kind of rough appetite upon what we can see now were very stupid
ideas, that does not make him a stupid man. We've had advantages;
we've had unity and collectivism blasted into our brains. Where
should we be now but for the grace of science? I should have been
an embittered, spiteful, downtrodden member of the Russian
Intelligenza, a conspirator, a prisoner, or an assassin. You, my
dear, would have been breaking dingy windows as a suffragette.'
'NEVER,' said Edith stoutly…
For a time the talk broke into humorous personalities, and the
young people gibed at each other across the smiling old
administrator, and then presently one of the young scientific men
gave things a new turn. He spoke like one who was full to the
brim.
'You know, sir, I've a fancy-it is hard to prove such
things-that civilisation was very near disaster when the atomic
bombs came banging into it, that if there had been no Holsten and
no induced radio-activity, the world would have-smashed-much as
it did. Only instead of its being a smash that opened a way to
better things, it might have been a smash without a recovery. It
is part of my business to understand economics, and from that
point of view the century before Holsten was just a hundred
years' crescendo of waste. Only the extreme individualism of that
period, only its utter want of any collective understanding or
purpose can explain that waste. Mankind used up
material-insanely. They had got through three-quarters of all
the coal in the planet, they had used up most of the oil, they
had swept away their forests, and they were running short of tin
and copper. Their wheat areas were getting weary and populous,
and many of the big towns had so lowered the water level of their
available hills that they suffered a drought every summer. The
whole system was rushing towards bankruptcy. And they were
spending every year vaster and vaster amounts of power and energy
upon military preparations, and continually expanding the debt of
industry to capital. The system was already staggering when
Holsten began his researches. So far as the world in general went
there was no sense of danger and no desire for inquiry. They had
no belief that science could save them, nor any idea that there
was a need to be saved. They could not, they would not, see the
gulf beneath their feet. It was pure good luck for mankind at
large that any research at all was in progress. And as I say,
sir, if that line of escape hadn't opened, before now there might
have been a crash, revolution, panic, social disintegration,
famine, and-it is conceivable-complete disorder… The
rails might have rusted on the disused railways by now, the
telephone poles have rotted and fallen, the big liners dropped
into sheet-iron in the ports; the burnt, deserted cities become
the ruinous hiding-places of gangs of robbers. We might have been
brigands in a shattered and attenuated world. Ah, you may smile,
but that had happened before in human history. The world is still
studded with the ruins of broken-down civilisations. Barbaric
bands made their fastness upon the Acropolis, and the tomb of
Hadrian became a fortress that warred across the ruins of Rome
against the Colosseum… Had all that possibility of reaction
ended so certainly in 1940? Is it all so very far away even
now?'
'It seems far enough away now,' said Edith Haydon.
'But forty years ago?'
'No,' said Karenin with his eyes upon the mountains, 'I think you
underrate the available intelligence in those early decades of
the twentieth century. Officially, I know, politically, that
intelligence didn't tell-but it was there. And I question your
hypothesis. I doubt if that discovery could have been delayed.
There is a kind of inevitable logic now in the progress of
research. For a hundred years and more thought and science have
been going their own way regardless of the common events of life.
You see-they have got loose. If there had been no Holsten there
would have been some similar man. If atomic energy had not come
in one year it would have come in another. In decadent Rome the
march of science had scarcely begun… Nineveh, Babylon, Athens,
Syracuse, Alexandria, these were the first rough experiments in
association that made a security, a breathing-space, in which
inquiry was born. Man had to experiment before he found out the
way to begin. But already two hundred years ago he had fairly
begun… The politics and dignities and wars of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries were only the last phoenix blaze of the
former civilisation flaring up about the beginnings of the new.
Which we serve… 'Man lives in the dawn for ever,' said
Karenin. 'Life is beginning and nothing else but beginning. It
begins everlastingly. Each step seems vaster than the last, and
does but gather us together for the nest. This Modern State of
ours, which would have been a Utopian marvel a hundred years ago,
is already the commonplace of life. But as I sit here and dream
of the possibilities in the mind of man that now gather to a head
beneath the shelter of its peace, these great mountains here seem
but little things…'
Section 6
About eleven Karenin had his midday meal, and afterwards he slept
among his artificial furs and pillows for two hours. Then he
awoke and some tea was brought to him, and he attended to a small